I live in Ra'anana, Israel. Ra'anana is a suburb not far from Tel Aviv. I am a lecturer in Jerusalem. I usually travel there about 3 times a week. I was there only yesterday for my College's opening conference. Right now, I'm sitting in front of my computer editing material for Yad Vashem's (National Holocaust Museum) project on the rail transports of the Jews out of Germany to the extermination camps in the East during the 1940s. You wouldn't believe the testimonies I have to read. You cannot imagine the belief system that the Nazis actually held and the calculated industrialized mechanisms they used to implement it. I have been working on this material for 4 years now, and never cease to be shocked anew.
As I type I can hear sirens going off all around me. I hear helicopters overhead. I look out of the window and see them circling above my house. Clearly, another Palestinian terrorist attack. These have been going on for over a week now in 'response' to Abu Mazen's claim that Jews are storming the Al Aqsa mosque perched atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The truth is that the status quo on the Temple Mount has not changed at all: Arabs are allowed to pray there; Jews are not. It's simple incitement following Abu Mazen's latest tirade at the UN calling for a renewal of Arab terrror against Israel. But the Palestinian populace, free to walk among the Jewish population at will (no, there is no apartheid system in place in this country) is all keyed up, and its youth is on a rampage armed with knives ready to slit the throats of anyone they care to encounter en route. Others find it more efficient to kill parents in front of their children in drive-by shootings; and some prefer to just ram their cars into lines of civilians (or soldiers - it doesn't matter which) who might be waiting for public transport. Palestinian terror is a lot more haphazard than Nazi terror, I grant you, but it stems from the same irrational root: Jews in our midst - absolutely not.
The apparent lack of logistics on the part of Palestinian terror gives apologists fuel for defending it with claims such as, 'But the poor oppressed Palestinians have no other way to vent their frustration.' What a load of rubbish. In a latest attack two cousins aged 13 & 15 stabbed a Jewish 13 year old as he was riding his bike. Talk about child abuse: what kind of mother sends her sons to endanger themselves in the name of Allah? In fact, most of the perpetrators of terror in the last 10 days have been young impressionable Palestinians. But others are not so young that they can't apply a modicum of critical thinking. Israa Abed, an Israeli Arab from Nazareth, shot after trying to stab a security guard, is a mother of three and a student of genetic engineering.
So now this spate of hand-to-hand terror is in my town too. Not just the Old City of Jerusalem, or in cities closer to Arab populations that are easy to get to. To my non-Israeli friends: you are constantly bombarded with headlines such as the BBC's “Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack kills two” that squarely blames Israeli security officers for defending civilians by deliberately describing the 'attack' in the passive to avoid actually saying that Palestinians are running amuck; or AP's recent headline "Israeli police shoot man in East Jerusalem" following a terror attack by a Palestinian who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of people disembarking Jerusalem’s Light Rail, killing a three-month old baby and injuring several more. Even worse, not only is the context incessantly (and irrevocably) removed, but sometimes there are no headlines at all! This devastating wave of Palestinian terror just doesn't fit the editorial agenda. So next time you read a headline about 'recurring violence in the Old City' or some such equivalence being portrayed between Palestinian terror and the sovereign country of Israel taking steps to curb it, try to put a face on the Jewish victims. Try mine. That could've been me walking down Ahuza Street in Ra'anana an hour ago.
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